My! How time has flown! Its been over a year since the last post on this blog. At the time I was nearing the end of my masters degree and needed to devote more time to completing my thesis. In May of this year I graduated with a master’s in Leadership and Organizational Studies. Beside the master’s degree my family increased by one. Our first born son arrived in April and attended the graduation ceremony to support his daddy.

As I promised last year, this blog may return but with a different flavor. Well, this blog is coming back and the new flavor will be more personal and family oriented. The blog will serve as a hub for family pictures and updates. Updates will vary in length and frequency depending on my availability and inspiration. At heart I am still a Mac user, so occasionally I’ll devote a post to the things of the Mac.

The rebirth of the blog comes with some changes. First, you’ll notice a new look. Beside the look, I’ve added links to pictures of immediate and extended family. And finally, the text of that thesis which took me away from this blog in the first place. For those of you that know me, it will not surprise you that my thesis was on Steve Jobs. Thus, look for the Steve Jobs link to immerse yourself in the depths of academic writing. My recommendation, read chapter 1 and chapter 4 if you’re casually interested.

Enough introductions. Take a look around. And come visit again.

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Life is full of crossroads. These are moments in life when we must choose. This is true when it comes to selecting which kind of computer to purchase, a Mac or a PC. It is also true in other areas of life. This blog has been essentially about choice. The choice to use a more advanced computer system. And now I stand at a crossroads myself. This time its not about choosing which computer to purchase. Its about which activities to pursue and how to prioritize my time.

I am married, employed full-time and a part-time graduate student. Blogging for me is a hobby. I’ve committed myself over the course of a year now to carve out time in my otherwise busy schedule to blog. However, I have come to a place in my life where I must choose between blogging and other activities. These activities are spending time with family, day job and graduate studies. I am nearing the completion of my graduate program. I’m in the last stretch of the race to my masters degree. Time is of highest value at this point in the process. I need to write my thesis by early spring of 2008 if I want to complete my masters before the arrival of my first child.

I have decided to place blogging on the back burner while I focus on research and writing of the thesis. It has been a difficult decision to make. Blogging about Macs is a whole lot more fun than doing graduate research and writing a massive paper. But I’ve come very close to completing the masters, I must refocus my energies and finish strong.

So, what will happen with the blog? The blog will become dormant for some months. I hesitate giving a specific time frame. But at least until May 2008. At that point I will re-evaluate my commitments and activities. I have hope that the blog will come back to life. However, it may undergo some changes in the process.

If you’re reading this in your email inbox, keep the subscription and you’ll be among the first to know when this blog has returned from hibernation. If you’re reading this at Gustacci.com, subscribe to email delivery to be among the first to learn about my future plans for this blog.

Thank you for your commitment and dedicated reading of this blog. Farewell now. I hope to see you again.

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One of the features that makes Mac OS X so user-friendly is the ability to drag & drop. On your Mac you can drag and drop files, icons and selections of text. I did a survey of the common drag & drop functions that make using a Mac a pleasure. Here’s what I came up with.

The Dock
Your Mac is equipped with a cool application launcher called “The Dock.” It’s the area at the bottom of the screen where a bunch of icons sit. Adding and removing icons from the dock is a snap. It’s as easy as dragging and dropping. If you need to add an application icon, grab it and drag it to the dock. Once you release the mouse it attaches to the dock. When you find that you don’t need certain icons on your dock, removing them is as easy as dragging them off the dock and letting go of the mouse. Pooh! They just disappear. Remember that removing the icon from the dock does not delete the program from your computer. Should you do this unintentionally, you can go back to your Applications folder and find the program icon you removed.

Trash
Getting rid of unwanted files is no more involved then dragging them to the Trash bin in the dock. This also works for ejecting CD’s and disk images. If you accidentally move the wrong file to the Trash, not all is lost yet. You can recover the file by clicking on the Trash and dragging it out. However, once you empty the Trash, it’s over. The file is gone and only specialized software can attempt to get it back.

Moving Files
Changing the location of files on your Mac is as easy as placing icons on the dock or moving files into the Trash. Just grab the file you want to move and drag it over the folder you want to place it in. When you let go the file will be copied to the new location and removed from where it was.

Activating a Web Link
Some applications support hyper links so that you can click on a web link in that application and a browser will launched taking you to the site. But say you’re using an application that does not support hyper links, what do you do then? Not to worry. All you need to do is highlight the link and drag it to a browser icon in the dock or an open browser window. And you will be taken to that site. This works with Safari, Mac’s native browser, as well as Camino and Firefox.

Looking-up Words
Mac OS X comes with a built-in dictionary and thesaurus. If you’re not sure what a word means while surfing the web or reading a text document, you’re in good company. Highlight the word and drag it over the Dictionary icon in your dock. If the Dictionary is already open it will display the word’s definition. This trick works only if Dictionary has been already opened. But it’s still a handy feature.

Storing Text Bits
Have you ever wanted to store a quote from an article you were reading online? One method to do this is to open TextEdit or Word and copy and paste the text. However, if you’re using Mac OS X (10.4 or later) you can store a portion of the text without opening another program. All you need to do is highlight the text you want to keep and then drag it to your desktop. The text clipping will be stored in a file on the desktop. By double clicking on the text clipping you will be able to read the contents as well as copy and paste it into another document.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list of what you can do in OS X by dragging and dropping. I hope this gets your appetite wet enough to play around and discover other things you can do using this technique. What other things have you done in Mac OS X by dragging & dropping?

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Enjoy.

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A great way to save time when using your Mac is to use keyboard shortcuts. Below, I’ve listed 27 commonly used keyboard shortcuts. You can find additional ones in the System Preferences under Keyboard & Mouse. In addition, Apple has a more extensive list of keyboard shortcuts on their website.

Bold Selected Text ……………………………… Command + B
Capture Portion of Screen to a File ……….. Command + Shift + 4
Capture Screen to a File ………………………. Command + Shift + 3
Close Tab/Window …………………………….. Command + W
Copy ………………………………………………… Command + C
Cut …………………………………………………… Command + X
Find & Replace ………………………………….. Command + F
Force Quit …………………………………………. Option + Command + Esc
Get Info …………………………………………….. Command + I
Italicize Selected Text ………………………….. Command + I
New Tab ……………………………………………. Command + T
New Windows ……………………………………. Command + N
Open …………………………………………………. Command + O
Paste …………………………………………………. Command + V
Preferences ………………………………………… Command + ,
Print ………………………………………………….. Command + P
Quit …………………………………………………… Command + Q
Save ………………………………………………….. Command + S
Select All …………………………………………… Command + A
Toggle Open Applications ……………………. Command + Tab
Toggle Open Windows in Application …… Command + `
Underline Selected Text ………………………. Command + U
Undo ………………………………………………… Command + Z
View All Windows …………………………….. F9
View Application Windows …………………. F10
View Dashboard ………………………………… F12
View Desktop ……………………………………. F11

The nice thing about keyboard shortcuts on a Mac is that most shortcuts perform the same task across the system. So, you only need to learn them once and you can apply them in just about any application.

Which keyboard shortcuts are your favorite? Are any of the above listed shortcuts new to you? Do you know of any that I missed? Please share with me in the comments.

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Speech
If you didn’t know this already, let me tell you - your Mac can speak. It can read off text and it can also respond to spoke commands. In the Speech section of System Preferences is where you can control the speech settings of your Mac. Here you can turn on and off Speech Recognition, as well as calibrate the microphone and modify a few other settings. Further, your Mac can read to you. It can read the text of alerts when they are displaced, it can announce when an application requires attention and it can also read selected text. Again, the Speech section of System Preferences is where you can modify the settings that control the speaking ability of your Mac.

Startup Disk
Most user probably will not need to modify any settings in this area of System Preferences. Basically, here you can tell your Mac to use a different Startup disk than your hard drive. You can tell it to use a network drive to load the operating system when starting up or a partition on the internal hard drive. My suggestion is, don’t mess with these settings unless you know what you’re doing.

Universal Access
The Mac is handicap accessible. Universal Access is a group of settings that can modify the way the system works and looks to assist people with various handicaps. There are settings to make the Mac more user friendly for visually impaired or hearing impaired people.

This wraps up the System Preferences series of lessons. System Preferences has another category called “Other.” Settings in this category will vary from user to user. These depend on software utilities that you install on your Mac. As you install utilities that are integrated into the Mac OS X, their preference panes will appear in the Other category of System Preferences.

To receive similar content from Gustacci.com, grab an RSS feed or sign up for email delivery. I hope you find this tutorial helpful. Please let me know your thoughts, comments and suggestions in the comments section.

More Mac Lessons: Mac 101

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Apple drops new Leopard build, may be release candidate
Labeled “Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard build 9A559,” the new release came just hours after the Cupertino-based company issued two minor updates to the previous full-sized build (9A527), both of which were aimed at testing the system’s automated Software Update mechanism.

Notice for Boot Camp Beta Users
The Boot Camp Assistant and license for Boot Camp beta versions 1.0b through 1.2b will expire on September 30th, 2007. Expiration does not affect installed copies of Windows. Updating the beta license is simple.

Hands on: Getting down to iWork ‘08
With iWork ‘08, the latest generation of its office suite, Apple has given Mac users a powerful alternative to Microsoft’s Office for Mac. This new version finally offers an alternative to Excel called Numbers, a spreadsheet tool unlike any that has come before it. It also adds some great new features to iWork’s other two applications — the presentation program Keynote and the word processor Pages — including a few that many users felt were lacking in previous releases.

Apple’s Leopard Will Exclude 800MHz G4 Processors
According to AppleInsider, Apple is about to announce that Leopard will not support 800 MHz G4 PowerPC processors. Previously developers had been told that it would require at least an 800 MHz G4.

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